Battery-powered electronic devices have become a ubiquitous staple of life. Electronic devices, such as smart phones, tablets, laptops, flashlights, keyboards, mice, headphones, and other portable devices are used on a regular basis, and as a result, their batteries need to be charged regularly. Because of this, electronic devices often provide users with information regarding the state of charge and information regarding the rate of discharge of a battery.
Display screens are one of the components that draw a large amount of power from batteries in electronic devices. Accordingly, it may be desirable to provide accurate power usage estimations for these screens. But such estimations have proven to be difficult to compute. For example, organic light-emitting diode (OLED) display screens are made up of an array of pixels, each pixel including red, green, and blue subpixels. Each of the different colored subpixels may have a different efficiency and may require a different amount of energy to provide a given luminance. As a result, the power consumed by an OLED display screen may vary depending on the content of an image that is being displayed. This may make it difficult to provide accurate information to a user about the battery drain associated with various apps used.
Along with these screens, electronic devices may include circuitry that may provide various functions. As a battery discharges to low levels, it may be useful to modify or change some of these functions to lengthen a battery life in an electronic device in order to increase an amount of time between recharging.
Also, since the power consumed by an OLED display screen is content dependent, it may be useful to inform an application's developer about the amount of power being used by an electronic device running the application. This may allow the developer to make power saving changes to the application.
Thus, what is needed are circuits, methods, and apparatus that may estimate the power being consumed by a screen of an electronic device, may provide further information about that power usage, may modify or change functions performed by the electronic devices based on that power usage, and may inform an application's developer about the amount of power being used by the electronic device while the electronic device is running the application.